The Bust

by Jamie Bennett

  Gaby’s eyes filled up like she was going to cry. “He took care of Kayden like he was his dad. He misses him now, but he’s…he’s really mad. Kayden wrote to him, too, but Ben didn’t read it. He tore up the letter.”

  I nodded.

  “But maybe you could tell Kayden that Ben’s doing well. Tessa is so happy at her new school and he got a big promotion with the team. And we’re very happy together.” She wiped under her eyes and smiled again, a shaky one.

  I nodded. There was no point in looking for a paper towel to give her, because Roy didn’t believe that people actually washed their hands after going to the bathroom, so he didn’t bother to provide towels or soap. “It does feel like many of the few people I know are very lucky in their relationships,” I mentioned, to distract her from crying. “My great aunt Maude, for example. Even though hers happened a long time ago and it’s just epistocary, like, in letter form, it’s so amazing for me to see how love works. Right now she and her boyfriend are planning their lives together, and he’s going to try to come for his spring break to see her, and if he can’t, she might even take a bus to Chicago. If she can leave her dad who it seems to have some substance abuse issues.”

  “Your great aunt?” She looked confused, but at least she wasn’t crying anymore.

  “This was a long time ago,” I explained, which didn’t seem to clear things up for her. “Anyway, I’ve never actually experienced love on a personal level, outside of some really good books. And made-for-TV movies.”

  “So you and Kayden…” She stopped and looked at me.

  “Oh, no. Nothing like that. We’re temporary roommates, that’s all. And friends. It’s really lucky that I met him or I wouldn’t have any friends at all besides Emma. Not that I need any, because she and I are great together, best friends forever. Like you said about Hallie from the bookstore, but you know a lot of other people, too,” I noted, and then I had that funny feeling again. That longing. “I don’t need anyone besides Emma,” I stated, and I meant it. Kayden was just a bonus.

  “Well, maybe that’s for the best. Until he gets himself all sorted out, right?” She leaned forward a little and I looked anxiously as her pretty sweater brushed the edge of the nasty sink. “My crown got messed up. I didn’t really want to wear it, but the girls insisted.” She straightened the metal and became a Bride! again. Her eyes met mine in the mirror. “Do you have allergies?”

  “What?”

  Her fingers fluttered around her own cheeks. “You have, like, a little rash?”

  I looked at myself in the mirror and a different pit grew in my stomach: fear. “It’s nothing,” I told us both. “It’s fine.”

  “I should get back to the table. Um, I really hope that Kayden is doing better. It’s not like I’ve totally forgiven him, but for Ben’s sake, I hope that they can have some kind of relationship again in the future.”

  I nodded, feeling the same way. “I’m glad you’re ok now, too. Very, very glad.”

  “I’m better than ok.” Gaby hesitated. “Maybe you and I could have coffee or something? If that wouldn’t be too weird,” she added. “And not at Holliday Booksellers, because Hallie is very bad at making it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I won’t be able to. I’m leaving Michigan soon. As soon as possible.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad. I guess that was what you meant when you said that you and Kayden were only temporary roommates.”

  I nodded again. Temporary roommates, with a temporary bonus as friends. But temporary meant that it would end, and I was definitely leaving.

  ∞

  “It’s fine,” I assured Jamison. “It’s not open yet today. I swear that I wouldn’t take you someplace illegal.”

  He still didn’t move toward the door. “I’m pretty sure that my mom wouldn’t want me to go into Roy’s Tavern. Or Miss Margulies, either.”

  “We’re only going here because the TV has a lot of sports channels and we can see Kayden play,” I explained again. “I know you want to watch the game and I do, too. The bar won’t be open for hours so only Roy’s here working on the books. See?” I showed him what I had in my bag. “I’ll cover up our chairs with these clean towels from my house and get you a soda…I mean, a pop. I just made Roy order some fresh supplies, so it will even have bubbles. Ok?”

  Roy took this moment to stick his head out of the door. “Who do you think pays the bills around here, the Easter Bunny? Why in the hell is this open and letting the heat out?”

  Jamison started to back up but I put my hand on his shoulder to stop the movement. “We’re coming in to watch the game, remember?” I reminded my boss.

  “Yeah, you have to watch the great and powerful Kayden Matthews. Looking forward to it.” He scowled at me but lost that expression when he turned his eyes to Jamison. “Who’s this?”

  “I’m Jamison and I’m eleven and in sixth grade. I’m a Helping Hands kid and Kayden is my volunteer except that he can’t come in on Saturdays now during the season, unless there’s a bye week. That means, unless he doesn’t have a game.”

  “I’m aware of what a bye week is,” Roy told him.

  “But Kayden has been making it up on other days which has been fun for me and makes things easier on my mom, because sometimes she has to work late at the Lodge. Do you know that resort?”

  Roy nodded slightly. “I do.”

  “And Miss Margulies worked it out with the probation people to change his hours so it’s all legal and Kayden won’t get in trouble. She understands how important it is for him to play again, not just for a paycheck, but emotionally. It’s really good for someone to feel like they’re accomplishing things, you know, for their self-esteem and self-worth.”

  I patted Jamison’s back. He and I had talked about that topic, but I hadn’t really expected him to share it all with Roy. I didn’t think my boss would take very kindly to the self-esteem stuff.

  But to my surprise, Roy nodded. “A man has to work or he doesn’t feel like a man,” he agreed with Jamison. “Get on inside.” We did.

  I managed to find the correct channel and to hit the TV in just the right place so that the picture stopped wavering in the way that tended to make people sick. When I turned around, Roy had invited Jamison to sit on a stool at the bar and had set him up with a Coke garnished with a cherry. I’d made him throw out the old jar of those that had expired in 1998, so I was comfortable that this was from a new, safe batch.

  Jamison got involved in watching the pregame show, which was two old guys sitting in a studio that looked like they were in someone’s basement. I had other things on my mind.

  “Roy?”

  “What did you do to these towels, wash them again?” He frowned. “They don’t work right in this condition.”

  “Do you think that people can change? Like, if they make mistakes…”

  “Are you talking about Matthews being a cokehead?” he interrupted.

  Working as a bartender for all these years had taught him to read people at times. At this particular moment, he had me pegged. “Yeah,” I sighed. “I was thinking about that and some things he did. Things that were terrible. They all involved him being high or drunk, but he doesn’t excuse himself.”

  Roy continued to polish glasses. “You think you’ve always been perfect?”

  “I know I haven’t, but I never hurt people that way.”

  “Hm.” I didn’t think that Roy was going to answer again, but then he spoke. “I had a problem with that shit. A real problem with booze and drugs.”

  “You did?”

  He nodded. “I kept it up for a long time, even after I met Dexter’s mom and we had him. That was why she took him away from me and moved to Detroit. She knew I’d be a shitty father, and I was. I treated her terrible,” he told me. “Threatened her. Hurt her. Did all kinds of things I wish I hadn’t, and I wish I could take them back.”

  “Oh.”

  “It was better for him that he was away from me, better for her, too. She u
sed to send me pictures of him and I’d look and want to know him, but even then I couldn’t stop, not even for my own son.”

  “What made you finally give it up?” I asked.

  His hand slowed and stopped polishing. “One day I was cleaning up vomit from this very floor and I realized it was mine. And I asked myself what I was doing, and how long I planned to keep doing it, and I closed the bar and I went off to quit.” He sighed. “I can’t change anything now, I can’t go back and fix how I treated people, solve the problems I caused. But no, I wouldn’t do those things again.”

  “Do you think that’s still inside you? Like, if you started using right now, would you do terrible stuff to people all over again?” I asked him.

  “That’s why I don’t drink.” He stared for a moment at the glass in his hands before he returned to polishing it. “I know that if I stay sober, I’m not that man anymore.”

  I looked around the room, considering. “So, to keep away from alcohol, you decided to work in a bar?”

  He glared at me. “I just finished telling you that I already had the bar when I quit. Was I going to leave my business? I’ve been clean for twenty-six years, longer than you’ve been alive. And if you’re going to ask me next if I think your boyfriend will stay clean too, I don’t know the answer. Not everyone does.”

  I thought about that for a moment before I remembered to say, “He’s not my boyfriend,” and then I added, “I wasn’t going to ask if you think he’ll stay sober, because I already believe that he will.”

  “So what the hell is your problem? You want to punish him for things he did while he was a junkie and a drunk, things that happened before he knew you?”

  “No! He got punished by the courts already. I also think he’s punishing himself enough.” And losing his brother, not having Ben in his life anymore, that was the worst thing that could have happened to him.

  “So, what? You don’t get no guarantees on anything in this life,” Roy warned me.

  “I know that!” I told him.

  “Then what the hell are you bothering me about? You keep telling me that he’s not your boyfriend anyway, so why do you care if he falls off the wagon?”

  Because I did. I’d be leaving, and I wanted to know that Kayden would be ok. That was important to me in a way that I didn’t totally understand, but I needed it to be true. “Thanks for telling me that about your past, Roy, and you’re right,” I said. “There are no guarantees about anything in life.” Now was the time to tell him that there was no guarantee on a waitress staying through the winter, and that I was quitting soon. I opened my mouth to do it, but hesitated for just a second.

  “I guarantee that kid is going to bounce off the goddamn walls if he drinks another glass of sugar and caffeine,” Roy announced. “He just served himself his fourth.”

  “Oh, lordy. I can’t return him to Helping Hands that way! Miss Margulies will kill me.” I walked over and removed the soda glass from Jamison’s hand. “Let’s just watch the game,” I told him.

  We did, with Roy supposedly doing his books, but mostly he was watching the screen along with us. It was strange, because there were no camera people, just a set shot from someplace far up in the stands so it was a little hard to tell what was going on at times. The two old announcers were somewhere in northern Michigan with us, so they were guessing, too. Jamison and I cheered our heads off at what we thought we saw, no matter what was actually happening. At first, Roy only made snippy remarks about what Junior might mean in other areas of the players lives, and when I shook my head at him, he made a gesture that referred to the penis area. But then he got sucked into the game, too.

  “That was quite a pass,” he said after Kayden threw the ball into the end region of the field, just as the blurry clock at the bottom of the screen showed all zeros.

  “Touchdown!” I yelled, certain that I was right about the name of that play. “And now it’s the halfback.”

  “Halftime,” Roy grunted. “Jesus save me from idiots.”

  “Kayden’s playing great,” Jamison said. “He said I can come to the next home game, too, so I can see him in person. Finally! I was sad I missed the first one but he didn’t want me to come.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  Jamison shrugged. “He said it was going to be really bad, that they were going to get creamed and I shouldn’t have to watch him be a loser. But he always tells me that it’s ok if I drop the ball or miss when I’m batting, so I don’t know. I think he’s tougher on himself than he is with to me. My mom says he’s his own worst critic.”

  “You talk about Kayden to your mom?”

  He stared. “Of course. He’s my friend, isn’t he? Kind of like a big brother. Yeah, I’d say he’s my brother. And she talks to him herself when he comes over. He brought dinner two times last week when you were at work. Pizza and lasagna,” he said with satisfaction. “Then we practiced batting so I don’t miss so much. That’s called a whiff,” he explained, like I needed to learn more sports terms.

  “Why is Kayden Matthews the man teaching you that? Where’s your father?” Roy barked at him.

  “Gone,” Jamison said, and he didn’t get into the why of it.

  “Hm.” Roy walked behind the bar and returned with a little box. “Anyone show you how to play poker yet?”

  “No!” Jamison said excitedly. “I’ve seen it on TV and I read the rules but I think it’s like baseball. You don’t really know it until you try it yourself.”

  “We’ll play now, since there aren’t any Woodsmen Dames to look at during halftime. They don’t put on much of a show, do they?” Roy asked. The TV currently broadcast an infomercial for hemorrhoid cream. “Take a seat and play,” he directed me, and I quickly wiped the tabletop so that the cards wouldn’t stick to it.

  “I have a son,” Roy told Jamison. “Hold up your hand so I can’t see it.”

  Jamison adjusted his cards so that they faced me instead. “What’s your son’s name?” he asked Roy.

  “Dexter. Damn it, Kylie, why would you want five cards?” he asked me when I held up my fingers. I just waved them at him until he passed over my request.

  “Roy wasn’t around when Dexter was a kid,” I told Jamison. “He wasn’t a good father.” My boss glared at me.

  “Why weren’t you a good father?” Jamison asked him, and then said, “I’ll take one card, please. This is just like Las Vegas, right? Can you tell what kind of hand I have from my expression?”

  Jamison was grinning from ear to ear, but both Roy and I shook our heads like we had no idea he was going to beat our butts. “There were a lot of reasons I was bad at being a dad. I wasn’t in his life when he was growing up,” Roy told him.

  “That didn’t mean that he doesn’t love his son,” I explained. “Roy loves him a lot. He wants to give him this bar, even.”

  “Gin,” Jamison announced, and laid down four of a kind.

  “Hot damn,” Roy said slowly. “Well, boys, we have a winner.” We took a moment to admire the cards. “I love Dexter all right, but I’m not going to push the tavern on him. He doesn’t want it, he’d just turn around and sell it and they’d put up some crappy candle store or another fudge shop. It’s the last thing this town needs.” He shuffled and bridged the cards from one hand to the next. “What about you, doll?”

  “What about me?”

  “Would you want this place? You keep saying you’re the damn floor manager. I think you could handle it for real.”

  I froze, not even able to pick up the cards off the table. “Roy, are you serious?”

  “Why in the hell would I make a joke about giving you my tavern?” he demanded angrily. “You think that’s funny?”

  “It’s not,” Jamison informed me. “I think he’s totally serious. I don’t need any cards.”

  “Roy, I…” I didn’t know what to say. I was leaving, I needed to tell him. I couldn’t believe that he was offering it to me, but I wouldn’t be here. I was already planning how Emma and I would g
et to New Orleans, because that was a place we’d never been and I thought it would be warm and pretty at this time of year. “Roy, that’s…”

  “Pick up your hand,” he growled at me, but Jamison was already laying his on the table.

  “Look!” he said, grinning even bigger. “I think I won again!”

  “I dealt you a royal flush? Kid, come down the street with me and let’s buy some lotto tickets,” Roy told him, and they got back just as the second half was starting. Roy didn’t mention anything else about the bar and neither did I, and I pushed it out of my mind as we watched Kayden lead the Junior Woodsmen to a victory, with the old announcers saying it was the best they’d seen him play in years.

  “I’ll be jiggered!” the one guy exclaimed. “Herb, that’s the Matthews we all were looking for when he came out of college!”

  I was proud enough of Kayden that I almost burst and Jamison was even happier than when he’d gotten the royal flush, but the day was getting late, and I had to shove him out of the bar so we could run to catch the bus to take us back to Helping Hands. Roy stopped criticizing the Junior Woodsmen defense long enough to say, “Stop badgering him. I’ll drive you there, otherwise your butt will be late to get back here for your shift.” We rolled in the Olds to drop off Jamison at the Helping Hands building, where we said hi to Miss Margulies and her charming dog Hank. Then I asked Roy if we could quickly stop by my house to check on Em.

  “It’s just up the street!” I reminded him when he started to complain about being a taxi service. We drove for a moment in silence, his very annoyed, and mine full of guilt. I felt like I had to bring up what he’d said to me earlier, about the bar. “Roy? I can’t believe that you offered your tavern to me. Or, was I wrong? Did you mean you want to sell it to me, or were you kidding?”

  “I meant what I said,” he snarled. “When I’m gone, if you want the tavern, you can have it.” He cleared his throat.

  “When you’re gone?”

  “I don’t know when that’s going to be, but it may be soon,” he told me. “Damn doctors don’t really know anything, do they?”